Business Development Lead, AI

As a Business Development Lead for AI & Compute at Monad Foundation, you own ecosystem growth at the intersection of AI infrastructure, agentic applications, and on-chain markets. You build relationships with AI founders, venture firms, and compute providers, turning those connections into early-stage teams building and launching on Monad. Your focus is where AI meets on-chain markets: tradable compute, agentic payments, and the capital markets forming around them. You identify where Monad adds value, close commercial deals, and make Monad a preferred settlement layer for live AI and compute products.

What you'll do

• Own sourcing and activation by building Monad's presence in San Francisco through founders and the wider AI community, developing the existing pipeline, sourcing new teams, and owning qualification, follow-up, deployment, and launch
• Build venture and capital relationships with venture firms and crypto-native capital, turning introductions into qualified opportunities and teams building on Monad
• Drive the compute-markets strategy by recruiting protocols, index providers, curators, liquidity providers, compute operators, and trading partners, and developing collaborations around compute index vaults, lending against tokenized compute, and hedging products
• Drive agentic payments by finding and activating teams building agent-driven and stablecoin payments, including x402 and emerging payment models, and converting integrations into real transaction activity
• Structure and close collaborations by understanding each business, making the case for Monad, and negotiating commercial arrangements across company stages
• Turn strategy into measurable outcomes by coordinating technical, ecosystem, DeFi, communications, and legal support, setting priorities and milestones, removing launch blockers, and tracking live products, users, payments, liquidity, and sustained volume

What you bring

• A record of closing and launching business development or strategic partnerships from initial conversation through to working product, including with growth or late-stage businesses
• Strong relationships and understanding in AI and compute, including knowledge of AI business models and the ability to bring together founders, venture investors, GPU providers, neoclouds, trading firms, and market makers
• Founder empathy and follow-through: you can explain why Monad matters to a partner, earn trust, bring in technical expertise, and sustain momentum through complex integration
• Autonomy and judgment to build your own pipeline, prioritize real use cases, set clear success and failure criteria, and stop investing in weak opportunities
• Based in San Francisco, with a desire to build relationships in person and spend time with the AI, compute, and crypto communities across the Bay Area

What we offer

• Challenging, deeply complex and technically demanding problems with autonomy and impact
• A world-class, exceptional and highly-motivated team working together to achieve ambitious goals
• A lean, collaborative culture united around low ego and high-quality output
• Access to a strong ecosystem with support from leading investors, builders and long-term contributors

About Monad Foundation

Monad Foundation is a core contributor to the Monad blockchain, a performant and parallel EVM Layer 1 designed to power on-chain finance at scale. The team focuses on growing the impact of decentralized technology through ecosystem and community building.